Berkeley will empty out over the next few days. There will be no flyer-wielders on Sproul, no packed-to-capacity 51Bs at 5 p.m.; I might finally get a table at People’s Cafe. Spring break will mean the en masse student migration from here to varying degrees of Elsewhere.
There will be those who stay, who make this new, empty Berkeley their Elsewhere. But most will not. Most will go skiing and swimming and sight-seeing. They will go home.
And these homes will be deictic. We will tell roommates when we plan to leave our apartments to fly home, and one week later we will tell these same roommates when we plan to arrive home at these same apartments.
It will be this transportation, this in-between homes, which will feel most true. Spring break is an in-between holiday. Unlike Christmas, there is no requirement to go home midsemester. And unlike summer, there is no implicit requirement of an internship to keep you from home. You might go home; you might not.
This city might be your home; it might not. It might be an in-between home in-between families — your born and your own. I’m not sure if I think it’s mine, or if I think my childhood home is.
When I’m a block away from my apartment on my nighttime walk home, I like to look up at the light coming out of my building’s second-floor windows. I cannot see my own apartment from the sidewalk, but during those last few traveling minutes, even my neighbors’ light is a signal of approaching warmth and day’s end.
And then I’m actually in the building and I’m exiting the stairwell on the second floor and I am either hit by a warm glow seeping out of my roommate’s bedroom or I am not.
When there is no light, my little bedroom is just one space in a long line of spaces in which I spend my time. It is a place I have paid for the right to occupy whenever I feel like doing so.
When there is light, the final few steps to my front door feel like obeying an undercurrent, like our apartment is a place to which I spend my days in the process of returning: a respite, a place of rest, a comfort. Home?
My love for this light might be metonymic; the home where I grew up also has windows I am conscious of fetishizing. I like to look up at the one on the second story on the right facing the sidewalk and imagine my little sister seated at her desk right behind it, her record player blaring Neutral Milk Hotel at our little black and white cat asleep on the bed. I like the way that image feels perpetual, like she might be doing just that right now, as I write this — like she might always be waiting for me to join her there.
If the only reason my apartment feels like home is that it reminds me of my childhood home, then this year will be the first I am not home for spring break. And that might be true: This will be my first spring break with no little sister and no little cat. But in the same way spring break feels in-between, home does too.
Because nostalgic images like the one of my little sister are always romanticized images and the reality is that Holly isn’t waiting for me at her desk behind that window — she is busy growing up like I am busy growing up and like my hometown is growing up and like this town is growing up.
It’s more like I’m outside both my apartment building and my childhood home, looking up at lit-up windows from my place on the street somewhere in between the two places, loving one in part for its relationship to the other and vice versa. As if ultimately the place all of this is really happening in is always right here in my very own head.
Ultimately, the only place in which you will ever feel completely at home isn’t really a place at all, because you are the product of so many different places that you are the only common denominator. What matters much more than which window I’m looking at is that I’m the one looking, as if home is the headspace that both Berkeley and my hometown have had a hand in building.
The summer before coming to Berkeley, I told my best friend I wasn’t sure how people learned how to grow up, and she told me that we already had everything we needed to do it, as if our entire lives had culminated, were always culminating, right there in the architecture inside our skulls.
And in that way, home is here and Elsewhere, where my roommate is and where my family is, in the Berkeley hills and the Asian Ghetto, outside my apartment building and in my bedroom; and when we tell roommates when we plan to leave our apartments to fly home and when we plan to arrive home at these same apartments, we will be right in both descriptions, as well as even in the plane between them.
Contact Sarah Burns at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @_SBurns.